"I will hound him in print in a way he has never experienced before." Professor Niall Ferguson's declaration of war on critic Pankaj Mishra for a hostile notice in the London Review of Books will have brought some pre-Christmas cheer to those who row in the galleys of literary journalism.

For a moment it seemed as if this would be the year in which peace broke out on the slopes of Parnassus. In May, Theroux shook hands with Naipaul. In America, the critic Dale Peck made up with his long-term foe, "the worst writer of his generation", novelist Rick Moody.

So, thank God for Prof Ferguson's thin skin. The only question is: will this "spat" descend into a full-blown "feud"? In the taxonomy of literary bust-ups, which takes in Dickens v Thackeray and Henry James v HG Wells, there are three basic categories.

First, there's the Row-Literary. This is really no more than the cost of doing business in Grub Street. The Row-Literary is usually inspired by a bad review. John le Carré's review of The Satanic Verses in the Observer is a locus classicus.

A small domestic incident quickly became an international bushfire when lifelong literary fire-raiser Christopher Hitchens merrily chucked kerosene on some smouldering embers. Feud watchers will know that it's the sign of a really good literary row when outsiders get dragged in.

Next, there's the Feud-Personal. This derives from more than a few negative sentences. The Feud-Personal is really a turf war between rival gang leaders. British critics have a reputation for vicious, close quarters knife work, but in the Feud-Personal the Americans are the masters.

Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, respectively "exquisite" and homophobic postwar writers competing for audiences and approval, took their enmity into dinner parties, book launches and, on one memorable occasion, a TV studio, where Mailer butted Vidal in the green room. Way to go! Later, floored by another blow from Mailer, Vidal bounced back with "as usual, words fail him". Now that Mailer is dead, Vidal can take satisfaction from being the last man standing (just).

Almost as iconic is the Feud-Personal between Tom Wolfe and Mailer, Updike and Irving, who said of Wolfe's fiction that it was "like reading a bad newspaper, it makes you wince". Mailer, much wittier, compared reading Wolfe's A Man in Full to making love to a 300-pound woman: "Once she gets on top, it's all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated." The joy of literary rows is often the quality of the invective.

Which brings us to the darkest, most bitter, quarter of the literary jungle, the scene of the Vendetta-Visceral. Idle commentators like to refer to Theroux v Naipaul, but that was mainly about Theroux's insecurity and Naipaul's prickliness, and essentially a Feud-Personal.

One world-class vendetta is Mario Vargas Llosa's feud with Gabriel Garc&iacute;a M&aacute;rquez, in which Llosa actually landed a punch. It's true that both of these Nobel-winning giants have deeply competitive instincts. What made their fight personal was Márquez's interest in Llosa's wife. Other Vendettas-Visceral include Turgenev v Dostoevsky.

By such yardsticks, we can see that the Ferguson-Mishra affair looks distinctly picayune, even if with charges of "racism" flying about it touches on a larger argument, another essential ingredient of a serious feud.

Compared with the intellectual wars that break out across the Channel, most of these Anglo-American imbroglios seem rather negligible. Consider, for instance, the case of two celebrated ennemis publics. The ferocious row between novelist Michel Houellebecq and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) kept Paris entertained for much of 2008.

Houellebecq's opening salvo described his opponent as "a specialist in farcical media stunts" who dishonoured even his trademark white shirts. To which BHL responded with a characterisation of Houellebecq as a "nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist". And so on for six jaw-dropping months.

There was, inevitably, a self-aggrandising dimension to this brouhaha. Houellebecq probably hit the nail on the head when he remarked, en passant, that "everything separates us from one another, with the exception of one fundamental point: we're both utterly despicable individuals".

Surprise, surprise, these "despicable individuals" found common cause in self-promotion. They have published the letters as a book, Public Enemies. Prof Ferguson has a lot to learn.

For tasty gossip, Celia is the hottest ticket in town

Celia Imrie, one of the treasures of the British stage, is shortly opening in a revival of Frayn's Noises Off. The publication of her memoir, The Happy Hoofer (Hodder), makes it an autumn double for Ms Imrie. Sadly, this enthralling paperback is short of an index, so the thespian community will actually have to read it to find their reviews. They will hardly be disappointed. Ms Imrie, whose childhood ambition was to marry Nureyev and become a ballet dancer, has worked with le tout West End from Victoria Wood and Judi Dench to Rupert Everett, and she does not hold back. The Happy Hoofer is backstage gossip from the premiere league. So far as I know, hers is the first autobiography that includes a recipe for cheese straws.

A culinary companion that's big on grilling

Speaking of food, in the contemporary stampede to become a self-publisher, former Big Brother producer Peter Bazalgette has the advantage of a good address book. He seems to have put this to work in his role as editor of Egon Ronay: The Man Who Taught Britain How to Eat, a slim hardback of biographical essays about the great Hungarian refugee who persuaded the Anglo-Saxons, in its editor's words, "to pull up their culinary socks". Not many recipes here for the ordinary cook, but some good stories. Fanny Cradock is (rather unkindly) remembered as "an average cook, a bigamist and a pantomime dame" who told the chairman of ITV to "fuck off". Mrs Cradock was busy: stuffing a turkey for the cameras. Michael Winner tells us that "food critics are the most useless people in the world". He's speaking, we hope, in a spirit of self-criticism.